The Cheese, the CEO, and Lancaster’s Year
Peggy Cummins smiled down upon Carly Bowman like an American madonna. Cummins had starred in Green Grass of Wyoming, the 1948 20th Century Fox release filmed at the fairgrounds. The movie poster on the flaking wall of Mark Kraft’s crumbling living room was an artifact from a trove of Lancaster ephemera collected by his family. It was a memento of the filming and the world premiere, held not at Grauman’s Chinese, nor Radio City Music Hall, but in Lancaster, Ohio, just one year after Forbes crowned it America’s town. Now Cummins—blond, pretty, wholesome as fresh air—watched as Carly melted her dope, filled her syringe, and slid the needle into her leg.
The house was dissolving around Carly. The risers of the staircase to Mark’s second-floor bedroom and the bathroom where he shot up had rotted to the verge of collapse. Patches of the plaster ceilings had decayed until cavities lay open to the lath underneath. The plumbing had corroded. Bits of dog shit dried where they dropped.
Carly had made a resolution to quit smoking. So far, she’d stuck to it. “7 days down, no cigarettes,” she wrote on her Facebook page on January 8. The self-congratulation appeared along with other upbeat tokens from the life of a twenty-five-year-old Ohio girl: the selfies, the cute clichés about friendship, the canned empowerment mottoes.
She didn’t post anything about heroin. Heroin was a need-to-know part of her life. She wasn’t trying to quit heroin.
The day after her triumphal Facebook post, a customer knocked at Mark’s door. Before, this customer had bought small amounts of dope, less than a gram. Now it was a little more than a gram, Carly’s upper limit. She was strict about selling within a set range: between .40 and a full gram. Her connect up in Columbus had given her a scale so she could be sure of the weights. She sold this gram for about $100, or $10 a point—a profit of 50 bucks.
Carly sold dope most every day. Though business was good, she had no savings, no checking account, no credit cards. She lived an all-cash life. Money flowed by her in a stream of fleeting euphoria.
Aside from dealing heroin, Carly wasn’t much different from any of her friends. She went to the same bars, ate the same pizzas, listened to the same music. Like most everybody else, she was a Buckeyes football fan. On January 12, the day of the national championship game against Oregon, Carly showed her support by posting “Sleepy today, but GO BUCKS!” on her Facebook page.
* * *
Lancaster had spent eight years skittering through the mucky cellar of its misfortune. Many of its older residents had come to feel exiled in place. It was a confusing sort of exile. The town looked like an inept imitation of the one they’d loved. Every day delivered another painful, frustrating discordance.
About three out of every five pregnant women who came to the hospital for prenatal care screened positive for cocaine, opiates, meth, Xanax. And those were just the women who came for prenatal care—a lot of young women didn’t even bother. Many babies were born addicted. When they were, they often wound up in foster care or with relatives.
“What was I going to do, let the state take them?” one unmarried woman on the west side—herself only marginally employed at a social service agency—said to me as a way of explaining how she had come to be raising a relative’s children in addition to her own.
About half of Lancaster City School District students, and three-quarters of children on the west side, were eligible for free or reduced-cost lunches, though many didn’t accept them because they didn’t want to be seen taking free food. Almost half—44 percent—of Lancaster households led by a single woman lived in poverty. Of those single female households, 57 percent with one or more related children were living in poverty; the figure was 80 percent for single mothers living with a child under five. The overall poverty rate of all families—married, single, cohabitating—with children under five was over 38 percent. The median household income was $37,494. The median household income in Ohio was about $45,700. In the United States, it was $51,849.
The hospital may have been the largest employer, but many of the jobs there, like housekeeping and assistant, were low-paying. Linda had worked there for twenty-three years, she told me, and made $17.25 an hour. After health insurance and other deductions, she figured she took home $28,000 a year, give or take. She paid $550 a month to rent a small apartment in an area known for drug traffic. Really, she said, she was doing fine, because she’d managed to save $53,000 in her 401(k) plan. She was fifty-eight years old.
Another woman, Tina, served me a drink at a bar. Later that week, I ran into her in another bar, where she pulled a draft beer for me. When I asked if she worked two jobs—commonplace in Lancaster—she said, “No, three. I’m full-time at the hospital.”
Doctors, some of the best-paid hospital employees, stopped wanting to live in Lancaster. They and their families moved to Granville, a college town up the road that’s home to Denison University. Or they lived in upscale Columbus-area developments and commuted in the opposite direction from their patients. They often cited the school system to justify their reasoning, but it wasn’t just the school system.
The streets sagged, the houses sagged, people sagged. The country club went bankrupt. Three prominent men, including a longtime Lancaster doctor, Henry Hood, the husband of Lancaster Festival cofounder Eleanor, bought it as a way to save it from becoming a commuter tract-housing development.
Vape shops, tattoo studios—Lancaster was heavily inked—mattress stores, car-title-loan offices, Dollar General, Family Dollar, and other retailers to the impoverished peppered the town. Hickle’s department store had turned into Lev’s Pawn Shop.
One day, I walked into an appliance store to find the childhood friend who’d taught me how to shoot BBs into plastic soldiers. His forefathers started in Lancaster retail a hundred years back. His father ran the place. His son worked there, too. He’d lived in Chicago for a while but had returned to Lancaster because his family was there, the store was there—all that tradition. After a hug and a moment or two of reminiscing, he looked down at the floor, sighed, and said, “It’s like everybody is just so discouraged.”
The mayor’s wife, Deb Smith, referred to the Lancaster story, the story Forbes told and the story kids used to learn, and said, “The mythology is so persistent and so deep in the culture, in families here, that the reality of this community—more people in poverty, away from opportunities that are the core of that mythology—creates immense fear and distress in those who have not fled. And when you are fearful, you become extremely defensive.”
Defensiveness manifested itself in denial or in a chasm of wrathful division mirroring the country’s own. When a developer named Leonard Gorsuch announced a plan to build Pearl House, a downtown residential facility for recovering addicts and their children, his daughter, Jennifer Walters, who spearheaded the project, received death threats.
Walters understood the vitriol. She’d opened a wound many wished would stay closed. Several years before, Lancaster’s medical, law enforcement, and judicial leadership produced a publicity campaign to alert the town and the rest of the state about the creeping opiate addiction. Since then, many, including some of those same leaders, had concluded that the effort had backfired by turning Lancaster into the easy exemplar of the problem. Now, once again, Lancaster wanted to avoid eye contact with its Carlys and Marks. Some, echoing the way many felt about Anchor Hocking, said they wanted heroin addicts to just die already and get it over with so Lancaster would be free of them.
It wasn’t just addicts. Though Lancaster retained a reservoir of goodwill for the disadvantaged, the unwell, the physically and mentally challenged, many others tried to ignore the town’s poor and ill-educated.
Lancaster still had a couple of nice neighborhoods, and if you lived in one, you never had to confront the erosion. Walters didn’t see it until she served on a federal jury in Columbus. It was a drug case. Afterwards, she traveled with a friend, a local judge named Patrick Harris. She told him about her jury duty, and what she’d learned about how the system of drug distribution operated in the region, including Lancaster.
“And he looked at me and goes, ‘Has your head been in the sand?’ But if you focus on your own career, your own home, you don’t have to see things if you don’t want to. He said, ‘Come to my court one Wednesday.’ So I show up, and I’m like, ‘Holy Crap! Where did all these people come from?’”
Many refused to believe Lancaster natives—multigenerational families—could be part of the trouble. Surely, outsiders must have discovered that Lancaster was an easy touch for free food, Housing and Urban Development–subsidized apartments, welfare. The theory relied on the improbable notion that ne’er-do-wells in Dayton, Cleveland, Columbus, and points east into West Virginia and Pennsylvania looked at a map of the United States and—instead of California, Florida, or any of a hundred other towns in Ohio—decided that Lancaster was the freeloader Shangri-la they’d been looking for.
A significant faction within Lancaster lost its moderate conservatism. Stoked by cable news, Internet videos, and right-wing politicians, they insisted that most of Lancaster’s problems had to be the natural product of an over-generous social service system that coddled lazy, irresponsible people.
How else to explain all the “Obama phones” those supposedly poor people carried around? they asked, referring to Lifeline, the subsidized telephone program that was created not by Obama’s administration but by Reagan’s. The program was expanded by George W. Bush to include cell phones so the poor could have phone service.
Back in the 1980s, Community Action, a social service agency based at the far eastern edge of town on Route 22, in what used to be the old county children’s home for orphans, received about two hundred requests for food packages per month. The number was now over two thousand per month. The agency also offered a limited number of supportive housing units. There was a waiting list.
Kellie Ailes, the Community Action executive director, often heard the narrative about lazy, irresponsible outsiders who could somehow afford lots of tattoos and cell phones. When I repeated it to her, she shook her head. “The people who come to us do not want public assistance,” she said. “They feel shame when they come.” When she was asked by a city councilman if the people to be helped by a planned subsidized housing project were locals, she researched the question and found that “virtually all” were from Fairfield County zip codes, mostly from the city of Lancaster.
“From the time Plant 2 closed, people lost jobs, lost homes, lost families, lost everything,” she told me. “And we worked with a bunch of guys from Stuck Mold” when it closed after the Newell takeover. She recalled a man she helped who’d lost his house. Then his wife left him. He could work but had some cognitive limitations. In the past, she said, he could have found a place at Anchor Hocking, but no more.
Ailes’s grandfather had been a foreman in the Anchor Hocking furnace room. He also served as president of the Lancaster Board of Education. Her father was a machinist in Plant 1. She was as Lancaster as it was possible to be. But when the Pearl House debate raged, she had to put her job on the line to support it. Some around town hadn’t yet forgotten. She’d made enemies.
Lancaster’s water was still not fluoridated, she pointed out, because a few die-hard anti-government conspiracy theorists remained convinced that fluoridation was a nefarious plot.
“They vote against their own self-interest!” Rosemary Hajost exclaimed to me one afternoon. Many with money preferred the low-tax mantra and conservative social-issue stances of the Republicans. Many union and working-class Democrats didn’t vote, and some who did viewed the modern party’s social-issues agenda—such as gay and transgender rights—as an attempt to impose an exotic order. Joe Boyer pasted a John Kerry sticker around a pole in his garage and an NRA sticker on his truck. He leaned Democrat but sometimes voted Republican because he worried that Democrats wanted his guns.
“I was on the school board,” Hajost continued. “And except for the first year, we were cutting and cutting and cutting. Over a hundred teachers out.” She worried that one day the wealthy would wake up to find a rabble in the streets. “People say that could never happen, but people thought we would never lose Anchor Hocking.” She said that, among her friends, “I don’t talk about the fact I voted for Obama.”
Even as many condemned both federal and state government programs and government spending, they ignored the fact that their town owed many of the jobs it had to both. Medicaid and Medicare supplied over 60 percent of the hospital’s income. The public schools were the second-largest employer in town. Anchor Hocking was third.
The absence of the critical mass of sophisticated leaders and their spouses that Lancaster once enjoyed left local politics to well-meaning but amateurish dogmatists. Once sedate city council meetings turned angry. In addition to the building of Pearl House, other issues, such as where to place a new, larger county jail, split the council into bungling, combative, factions. Endless arguments over seemingly minor issues—downtown parking dominated meeting agendas—sidetracked members from the city’s bigger problems. The majority remained captured by an ultra-conservative, anti-tax philosophy that prevented them from raising funds to repair the crumbling streets or challenging the ridiculous ban on fluoridated water, even as their pro-business bias blinded them to how Newell and Cerberus picked their pockets.
Some, supported by gadfly citizens, were convinced that Gorsuch secretly orchestrated a cabal that ran the town and foisted low-income Section 8 housing on Lancaster. Nobody ever presented any evidence (“I’m not sure I can trust you,” one citizen told me after swearing he had proof, then reneging on his offer to show it), but they were convinced the low-income housing, not the economy, was responsible for the undesirable “outsiders.”
There was real corruption, though. In September 2014, the county clerk of courts, Deborah Smalley, a Republican, was sentenced to eighteen months in prison for misusing nearly $40,000 of public money and for intimidating employees to campaign for her election. Her conviction, coming after former sheriff DeMastry’s in 2002 and former judge McAuliffe’s in 2004, was yet another black mark on Lancaster’s reputation.
Others blamed a generalized immorality, a breakdown of old restrictions and codes: all those young single mothers and “baby daddies.” All that drug use. An aversion to hard work. But they attributed these trends to “the media” or liberalism, not the decades of lousy education, economic collapse, and the minimum-wage and barely-above-minimum-wage dead-end jobs that replaced factory work.
Some responded by retreating into the comforting certainty of fundamentalist Christianity. As membership at Nancy Frick’s beloved St. John’s Episcopal declined, along with that at other mainline Protestant—and Catholic—churches, membership boomed at Fairfield Christian. (Brian Gossett referred to the big, modern campus on Lancaster’s northwest edge as “Fort God.”) Its affiliated school, Fairfield Christian Academy, founded in 1998, enrolled about five hundred students, making it by far the largest private school in the county. Every Sunday, another ministry, Crossroads.TV, packed a couple hundred worshippers into a big space in the River Valley Mall vacated by an out-of-business store and broadcast its rock-’n’-roll-and-tattoos brand of evangelism on cable TV.
The town had approved that small shopping center, located by the banks of the Hocking, north up Memorial Drive, in the wake of the Plant 2 closing, hoping it would bring in some taxes. When it opened in 1987, just as Newell took over Anchor Hocking and closed the downtown headquarters, the mall gut-punched the downtown merchants for the second time. Almost twenty years later, there were days you could shoot a cannon down the mall’s main artery from Dick’s Sporting Goods to the Sears and be pretty sure you wouldn’t hit anybody.
Like Carly, who trumpeted her will to stop smoking while pumping heroin into her veins, many in Lancaster, at least many over fifty, concluded that negativity, not reality, was the enemy. People were discouraged, but they were sick of being discouraged, sick of talking about drugs, sick of fretting over jobs, sick of bad news. The new year, 2015, was going to be the year it all turned around.
The mayor, the few remaining service clubs, and an organization promoting a rejuvenated downtown, called Destination Downtown Lancaster, stressed the truth, though it was obvious: “We’re no worse off than a lot of other places.” Some—likely many—towns were indeed worse off than Lancaster, but setting such a low bar had never been the Lancaster way. Lancaster had always thought of itself as exceptionally wonderful.
Though the optimism seemed forced, it wasn’t entirely unjustified. After pointing out the addition of a couple of new restaurants and the two downtown buildings being restored—the Mithoff and the Columbian, which was being turned into a court building—most talked up the new schools. After years of starving them, Lancaster had narrowly passed a convoluted tax levy engineered to convince voters that Lancaster’s upper class would be squeezed the hardest. The new money would have been nowhere near enough, but the state government kicked in funds—nobody seemed to object to that government spending—and now five new elementary schools were either on the drawing board or under construction.
When the Buckeyes romped over Oregon, 42–20, on Monday, January 12, Lancaster celebrated. Once again, the title would return to where everyone knew it rightfully belonged. For a moment, echoes from the era of legendary coach Woody Hayes bounced around town. Many still remembered when Lancaster sent quarterback Rex Kern to Hayes. Kern was the son and the nephew of barbers; Uncle Bud ran the shop in the basement of the hotel. When Hayes and Kern beat O. J. Simpson and those other flashy Californians from USC in the 1969 Rose Bowl, “li’l ol’ Lancaster” claimed the victory as its own.
This win wasn’t quite as sweet, but it seemed to be a portent. The day after the game, the board of the Lancaster Festival announced more good news. Joe Piccolo, a northern Ohio native who’d been working at the Aspen Music Festival, in Colorado, was hired as executive director. Aspen was big-time, yet Piccolo talked about how excited he was to come to Lancaster.
The town and the festival’s board felt lucky to get him. There had been anger over the firing of the previous director, Lou Ross. Nobody used the word “fired”—everyone thanked everyone else for years of service, expressing mutual best wishes—but Ross had been fired and he was sore about it.
The festival was nearly broke; the whole enterprise seemed a little stale. The blame fell on Ross, and for him that was the worst part. He’d worked like a mule, year after year, coordinating the volunteers, helping set up stages, paying bills, and booking talent. In the weeks before each festival, he lived on junk food and little sleep.
The whole point of the festival was to showcase the Lancaster Festival Orchestra by having it play with whatever musical group or singer agreed to headline. That was what made the Lancaster Festival different from a dozen other summertime music and arts fests around the region. The orchestra was Lancaster’s own. The first two festivals featured the Columbus Symphony, but every year since, for two weeks in July, the festival had formed an ad hoc orchestra made up of musicians from Chicago, Columbus, Cleveland, New York, Portland, St. Louis—even Taipei—under maestro Gary Sheldon, now the principal conductor of the Miami City Ballet orchestra. Some musicians had been coming for more than twenty years. They stayed with families and ate at the Pink Cricket. They performed chamber concerts around town. And on the two Saturday nights, on a stage set up by a creek fronted by a hill that formed a natural grassy amphitheater behind the Ohio University branch, they joined the likes of the Beach Boys, Ben Vereen, and Aretha Franklin in what amounted to Lancaster’s backyard party.
Seeing the famous-but-faded was fine back in the 1980s and ’90s, but the novelty had worn off. Young people wanted music that was very different from that favored by the old guard left over from Lancaster’s glory days. But the old guard were the only people who could afford to make donations and pay for catered tables up by the stage, instead of bringing picnic baskets and a blanket to spread out on the hillside. Most people loved the festival, and many said it was the best thing about Lancaster. But there were gripes that Ross never booked Taylor Swift or that guy on the show—what’s his name—Blake Shelton. He tried his best to book acts people wanted to see (and would pay to see), but it was never easy. He explained over and over that the festival’s budget couldn’t come close to paying Taylor Swift’s fees.
Worse, during the two weeks of the festival, the art shows, piano concerts, and kids’ puppet theater didn’t make a profit, ran at a loss, or were free of charge. Nearly the entire operating budget depended on free labor from platoons of volunteers, on donations, and on drawing big crowds to the two Saturday nights. But it rains in Ohio in July—sometimes with violent electricity arcing through the sky and tree-bending winds. Storms had hit the previous two years, smack-dab on those Saturday nights, and walk-up ticket buyers, having seen the forecast, didn’t show. What the hell was Ross supposed to do about the goddamn weather?
That was the past, though, and Lancaster was now looking forward with all the determination it could muster. Piccolo was to be the man who would take the Lancaster Festival into a new, splashier era. He didn’t know it yet, but Lancaster was counting on him to help save the town.
Much of the grim optimism was invested in a vision of Lancaster as a tourist magnet. Lancaster could be hip. It could be an artist colony. Those hopes partly depended on the success of the festival.
A group of Ohio State University urban-planning students had come to Lancaster and suggested as much. Spruce up downtown, it instructed. Showcase the old buildings and Sherman’s house—the assets saved by Nancy Frick’s generation. Put a modernist glass sculpture on the empty block where Lancaster Glass used to stand. Maybe open up a few cool coffeehouses. Use the festival to promote Lancaster as an arts destination, get some artists to live there, and—voilà—you’d have a midwestern Brooklyn.
“It is okay for Lancaster to embrace its old industrial ways, but the economy is demanding a more leisure-oriented and cultural base.” The group did not say who would pay for the leisure, or who would serve the leisure class. And even if “the economy” were demanding such a thing, Lancaster never had. Lancaster worked for a living—or at least it used to. But those days were over. Industry had died of natural causes—everybody knew that. Lancaster should become a postindustrial amusement park. The future was an artisanal-scone-based economy.
As tenuous as that future may have been, many cast their eyes toward it. They wanted to ignore Anchor Hocking the same way they wanted to ignore Carly and Mark. Like it or not, though, Lancaster still needed Anchor more than it wanted to admit.
“Oh my gosh, we would really, really be in bad shape” if Anchor Hocking closed, city council president Cathy Bitler told me. “Do we need those thousand jobs? You bet we do!”
* * *
Sam Solomon, EveryWare Global’s—and so Anchor Hocking’s—new CEO, was loath to say it out loud. Every time he thought about doing so, he pictured himself sitting in a courtroom witness chair. But it was clear that he’d concluded that the only way to save EveryWare Global—and therefore Anchor Hocking—was to scrape Monomoy off its back. Anchor Hocking wasn’t dying a natural death; it was being killed.
Pinpointing exactly when he began to despise his bosses at Monomoy Capital Partners was a little like trying to decide exactly when a marriage curdled: you could never blame the sour taste on one incident at one moment in time. But by January, his contempt was obvious. Nothing had gone the way he’d hoped when he first walked through the doors on Pierce Avenue the year before.
Since leaving his first post-M.B.A. job, at Procter & Gamble, Solomon had fielded calls from headhunters. Depending on the match between his current job and his ultimate ambitions, he’d listen, or not. In November 2013, he received a call about the EveryWare Global CEO job.
At the time, Solomon was working at Sears Holdings. He ran the Craftsman brands—tools and paint. The majority owner of Sears was a hedge funder named Eddie Lampert. Lampert made a name for himself in the early 2000s by avoiding Internet companies and investing instead in unglamorous businesses like AutoZone, a chain of auto parts stores. After the dot-com bubble popped and he became a multibillionaire, fawning media profiles followed. So when Lampert merged Sears with Kmart and made lots of claims about how profitable the new Sears Holdings would be, the stock ran up. But by the time Solomon joined it in 2011, Sears was faltering.
Solomon thought he would be able to spin Craftsman out of Sears and run it as a stand-alone company. He believed Lampert would go along with the idea, but Lampert, Solomon said, decided he didn’t want to lose a revenue driver for the Sears stores. Also, and perhaps not coincidentally, at about the same time that Solomon got the call from the headhunter, Sears stock was falling like a sack of potatoes. On November 25, 2013, it was a hair above $50. Two months later, it hung at just over $29. So Solomon listened.
By January 2014, conversations with Monomoy had turned serious. Solomon flew to New York to interview at Monomoy’s offices, in the Metropolitan Tower on Fifty-seventh Street, next door to the Russian Tea Room and just down the block from Carnegie Hall. The reception lobby of the seventeenth-floor suite was decorated with totems of American industry. To the left, a silvery piece of cast metal, about eighteen inches high, sat on a display pedestal like a piece of brutalist art. On the wall to the right, a large photograph depicted an industrial landscape with a man walking across a bridge, a factory in the background. The red-tinged light in the picture made it hard to tell whether the man was walking to or away from work.
Solomon understood the basics of private equity’s business model, as well as both sides of private equity’s reputation. PE’s general partners—the firm and its principals—formed one or more funds. The funds were pools of cash, obtained from investors, such as pensions, endowments, other investment houses, and very wealthy individuals. These investors were the limited partners. The PE firm made money by charging the limited partners 2 percent management fees on the money the investors deposited into the fund, and 20 percent of any profit after the fund vaulted a rate-of-return hurdle. Monomoy set an 8 percent hurdle, standard for the industry. Legally speaking, the 20 percent was not salary; it was “carried interest,” a term with roots dating to the era when cargo was shipped—carried—by sailing vessels on risky voyages, and the captain of a vessel took a percentage of the cargo as part of his compensation. As carried interest, PE’s income wasn’t taxed as regular wages subject to the tax brackets that bound most people. It was considered capital gains and taxed at 20 percent. The top bracket most PE principals would occupy if they weren’t in private equity but earned the same amount of money would require them to pay double that—39.6 percent. PE firms also charged a variety of fees. For example, they billed the companies they bought “advisory fees” for providing business wisdom.
PE enthusiasts tended to view private equity investment outfits as saviors who could buy a company, boost efficiencies, create strengths that had faded under previous owners, and then sell the company at a profit, thus enriching both the general partners and the limited partners. The target company emerged better positioned to compete in capitalism’s grand marketplace. Everybody won.
PE critics, on the other hand, viewed the buyout shops as chain-saw cowboys who slashed employment, cut investment, and shut down marketing and research—all in order to goose the bottom line just long enough to foist a shiny, but hollowed-out and highly indebted, company onto new buyers and then count their money on the helicopter flight from Manhattan to their summer houses in the Hamptons.
Solomon regarded private equity as a matter of perspective. If you were a PE general partner, he told himself, “strip-and-sell is a great freaking return” on your money. If you were a target company employee, or a small town where that company was located, you might prefer to add value through investment in people, machines, and research and development, for a long-term benefit. Business finance isn’t religion: Nobody—at least nobody whose voice mattered much—was going to condemn you for making money either way.
Solomon’s dispassion hadn’t come naturally. He had to learn it.
* * *
He liked to say that he was bred with a blue-collar work ethic. No matter how successful he became, Solomon always carried thoughts of his father and the rest of his people in the tobacco fields of Warren County, North Carolina. They shopped in the usurious landowner stores, went into debt, made up the debt by sweating through backbreaking days, then fell back into debt the next year laboring for “Mr. Charlie.” In between harvesting and planting tobacco, they worked odd jobs like stacking wood and got shortchanged for their labor. But they didn’t do much about being cheated, because arguing with a white landowner was never going to get you anything but trouble. His father joined the air force to escape that life, and because of his dad’s decision, Solomon had been educated in good, integrated military-base schools in Panama and along the East Coast.
He was a smart kid, and though his school counselors had their doubts—because Solomon was black—he applied to Duke University, a temple of the white South named for tobacco barons. He was accepted, with a scholarship.
Then he messed up. He was still dating his high school girlfriend that first year. By the end of it, she was pregnant. He started his sophomore year as a married man, then became a father. With his scholarship, continuing at Duke might have been possible, but then the child was diagnosed with leukemia. His scholarship wasn’t going to pay medical bills, but the military would. So Solomon dropped out and joined the army. When the boy died less than a year later, the marriage seemed to lose its purpose, as did Solomon’s military career. Solomon and his wife divorced, but the military refused to let him divorce it. For the next three years, he worked in computers, telecommunications, and intelligence for the army while his former Duke frat brothers went on to medical school or good jobs.
When his hitch was up, Solomon pulled out of Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and drove toward Houston, where his parents were living at the time. Normally, that’s a six-and-a-half-hour trip, but Solomon took six days. He saw some sights, he partied, and he called Duke. The university told him he was welcome to come back. The scholarship, though, was gone.
At his reunion dinner in Houston, he announced the good news about resuming his college education at Duke, fully expecting his father to offer financial as well as moral support. There were toasts and huzzahs, and then his father took him into the backyard for cigars and brandy to express his pride in his son for accepting his responsibilities like a man. He had made a big-boy mistake but had done the right thing. But because he had blown his first shot at a paid-for education, he should keep right on being a man and pay his own way.
Solomon moved to New Jersey, where he studied marketing at Rider University while supporting himself with his army-gained computer skills by working at tech companies. After graduating, he applied to Duke’s M.B.A. program. This time, his parents agreed to help.
When he was accepted into Duke’s grad school, his mother, swelled with pride, couldn’t help bragging to Solomon’s aunt that her boy was getting an M.B.A. at Duke University. M.B.A.s could make real money, maybe $60,000, $80,000 per year right away, she said.
“That boy is gonna drain you of every penny you have,” his aunt snapped. “No black person ever makes that kind of money.”
Solomon did make that kind of money, and a lot more. But his tour around America’s corporate landscape taught him that the career he chose did not mirror the life he had left behind. His family’s history—and the military, too—instilled in Solomon “a huge sense of fair play, that there’s a right way to do things, a right way to treat people.” As a junior executive in modern business, though, “you pretty quickly learn that these people that you are supporting aren’t exactly playing the game the way you thought it was gonna be played.”
Solomon became a pragmatist, not an idealist. The game existed, and he wanted to win, but to do so he’d have to play the game he found. If PE was part of the game, an instrument he could use to further his ambition, then so be it.
Still, he was a build-value guy, not an extract-value one. So he was cautious going into his meetings with Monomoy. As he walked back out onto Fifty-seventh Street, though, he felt encouraged.
“This was also articulated, and I believed to be true: [EveryWare] was the jewel of [Monomoy’s] crown. It was their largest investment at the time, the only public entity that they had at the time. And they were now professing a desire to move to the next level of private equity.”
Monomoy was a small shop, compared with giants like Cerberus, the Carlyle Group, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR), the Blackstone Group, and Apollo Global Management. After his interviews, Solomon believed Monomoy saw EveryWare as a ticket to PE’s big time. EveryWare had potential to grow, to maybe become a billion-dollar enterprise. Monomoy had already extracted enough cash to make back its investment and more, but Solomon was fine with that as long as it was willing to pivot to growth and to hire him to lead the way.
That’s what he’d always wanted but—as with the near miss at Sears—had not yet found. He had come to believe nobody was going to hand him the reins of a big, stand-alone company. Maybe his race had something to do with that, maybe not, but if he was ever going to be the man in control, he was going to have to build a billion-dollar company beneath himself. He was fifty-five years old. EveryWare looked like his shot.
But Pierce Avenue in Lancaster, Ohio, proved to be a world away from Fifty-seventh Street in Manhattan, and not just geographically. Too much had gone on within EveryWare since he’d come to town in February, most of it hidden from view, buried by nondisclosure clauses in contracts: silence bought with money paid to departing executives.
The month before, he’d sat down at a table in his office, scribbled a series of numbers on a piece of scratch paper, shoved it across the table, and stared at me as if the meaning of the numbers were so obvious, so incriminating, that there was no need to dissect them. He walked into a low-rent circus when he entered his new office that first day. The situation was worse now. EveryWare, and therefore Anchor Hocking, was near death, though nobody in Lancaster knew what Solomon knew.
* * *
The day after the national championship game, around noon, at almost exactly the moment the Lancaster Festival Board announced the hiring of Joe Piccolo, Carly heard another knock on Mark’s door—this time so thunderous and angry it rattled the house. Men in bulletproof vests smashed through the door and charged into the living room.
Eric Brown was one of them. His Major Crimes Unit had been buying heroin from Carly for over a month, a little more each time. The January 9 buy of a gram, and the fact that Mark’s house was within one thousand feet of East School, jacked up the possible charges against Carly to a felony, mandating a “presumption for a prison term,” according to the Ohio Revised Code. The MCU had been biding its time so it could make that charge. Now it could hold prison over Carly’s head and hope she would drop a dime on everybody she knew in Lancaster’s parallel society of dope.
Brown took a few minutes to look around the house: the dog shit, the staircase, the trashed bedrooms upstairs, the falling-down plaster, the beat-up walls, a vintage Lancaster High School class photo, Peggy Cummins. None of it really surprised him. Unlike most people in Lancaster, he spent a fair amount of time in the homes of addicts.
Brown was tired. The MCU had been formed in 2001, when meth was the drug everybody worried about. It was fourteen years later, and what had been accomplished? Different drug, same story. He told himself that the situation would be far worse without his work and that of his fellow officers—which was probably true—but they were treading water, and he knew it.
He’d once attended a National Narcotic Officers’ Associations’ Coalition conference in San Diego, during which he trooped down to the Mexican border as part of a field trip. “Here I am, hometown America, and I just couldn’t believe it. It was like a whole other world. I walked around down there with my jaw dragging on the ground.” Thousands of cars, and many thousands of people, crossed the border hour after hour. In his mind, he saw dope in the cars, and imagined that dope finding its way into Lancaster, to a dilapidated house on King Street.
While some of it would come from poppies grown in Mexico, the war in Afghanistan unleashed tons—8,600 tons in 2014—of opium onto the world market, depressing prices no matter where it originated. Brown believed the war in Afghanistan was a lot more complex than most Americans realized. The way he figured it, behind-the-scenes deals between the Americans, the poppy farmers, and the Afghan government had been made to keep the place from blowing apart.
A detective pulled Carly out of the house and sat her down in the backseat of his car while his colleagues searched Mark’s place. They’d find over ten grams of heroin and $103; Carly had just brought down a fresh supply.
Using the gentle tones of a priest preparing to hear a confession, the detective recited her Miranda rights. Carly sniffled a little, but recovered quickly. And then she talked. She named every customer she could remember and her Columbus connect, too. Once they were sitting in a cop’s car, Lancaster junkies always talked. The junkies all knew they always talked.
Carly also knew what else to say. “I do want help,” she told the detective. “I would prefer to have rehab and get help, because obviously I’m not a bad person. I have a problem, and I would love to be clean.” Every arrested junkie said this, too, or some version of it. Who wouldn’t prefer rehab to jail? Most of the time, they meant it—at least when they said it.
Mark wasn’t home. He’d just left work on his lunch hour to make a run to the ATM. He had cell phone and car insurance bills to pay. On the way back to work from the bank, his phone buzzed. An MCU officer told Mark that Carly was in trouble, but he wasn’t. Mark should come home, though, to retrieve his dog.
Mark wasn’t too worried. He’d skated by so many close calls with cops, it was downright weird. Besides, he stashed his dope elsewhere. Anything the MCU found would be Carly’s.
He almost laughed when he pulled up to the house. King Street was blocked off with those big $50,000 SUVs, like they were busting a terrorist cell or something. The front door was damaged, like they just had to crash it. He stepped inside, and right away thought the house felt like a big show—cops all suited up to take down a girl drug addict—but before his thought about how bogus it was had completely formed, somebody threw him on the floor, searched him, took the $360 he’d just taken out of the bank, and said the cash sure looked like proceeds from his criminal behavior. They took his phone and said he was now under arrest for permitting the use and sale of drugs from his home.
Brown called Carly’s father. He hated making those calls. They ate away at him. At least the bust might help Carly and Mark. Addicts sometimes told him that being hauled into jail, and then diverted into rehab, saved their lives, but you could never tell. Arresting a couple of kids—which was what they were, really—was not guaranteed to change them or to nick Lancaster’s heroin trade.
* * *
As a matter of fact, Brown was unaware that, at the moment of Carly’s arrest, a man named Jason Roach was appointing himself Lancaster’s new dope king. Jason had just met this guy, the Cheese, in the same place lots of people in Lancaster met a connect: the Fairfield County Jail, on Main Street. What Jason was doing in the Fairfield County Jail for a day or so made for a long story, but anyway, the Cheese seemed like a good dude. Jason had met him before, you know, around, and when he heard Jason was at loose ends—just out of a South Carolina prison as of January 1, no job, no money, living on a little SSI (Supplemental Security Income)—the Cheese said, “Dude, I can totally fix you up.”
That sounded good to Jason. He was a family man, in love with Jessica Cantrell, though they were kind of broken up at the moment, seeing as how Jason had spent the past two years in prison.
Jessica, who looked a little like Ava Gardner if Ava Gardner had played in The Grapes of Wrath, arrived in Lancaster in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina. She and her mother and brothers had lived in Louisiana. They weren’t doing all that well, and the storm only made everything worse, so when Jessica’s mother called a friend who lived in Lancaster, and the friend suggested they come north, they did.
Jason and Jessica had a child together, and she had kids of her own with a couple of other dudes, though Jason considered himself their father, too. The hitch, though, was that Jason was sick of scrambling around for minimum wages and government checks. He’d watched his own mother live on SSI and never have anything, and there was no way in hell he was going to raise his little brood that way.
Jason had a soft face, with gentle eyes framed by short brown hair. A tattoo of a single tear under one eye looked like actor’s makeup for a prison picture, not the genuine tat of a guy who’d served time in prison, though Jason had done two stretches already—the first for a felony assault; he’d served five years for it. Really it was his brother’s rap; Jason just happened to be there.
He married shortly after that first time in prison, and lived for a little while with his new wife in the Columbus suburb of Upper Arlington. (Jason always stressed “Upper Arlington.” He’d grown up around Columbus and knew that rich people lived in Upper Arlington.) Life wasn’t working out as well as he’d hoped, so the couple moved to South Carolina to be near Jason’s father-in-law.
His wife went to work for her father while he got a job with a moving company. Moving’s brutal on a fellow’s back. Jason blew a disc. During the operation, the doctors gave him fentanyl, and then, after the surgery, Perc 30s—or was it Oxy? Jason never told a story exactly the same way twice—and Xanax, all of which Jason enjoyed very much, which explained how he morphed from a casual drug user into an addict, and why he used his father-in-law’s credit cards.
When he heard that a warrant for misusing them had been issued, Jason ran back to Ohio. His mother had since moved down to Lancaster. So, in 2009, Jason landed there, too. He worked a little landscaping here and there, and for a small catering business, but the pay was bullshit. He wasn’t ever going to get anywhere that way.
When he met Jessica, they fell in love pretty quickly. The relationship was messy and volatile, with a domestic violence charge against Jason and a trip to court over support, and both of those cases were complicated by Jessica’s arrest for heroin trafficking. She served a stretch in prison during 2013, right about the time Jason’s South Carolina warrant finally caught up to him. He was extradited and served a couple of years, but now he was out, back in Lancaster, and clutching a phone number provided by the Cheese.
The Cheese was a man of his word. He really did have a big-time connect: Mexicans up in Columbus.
Jessica was almost twenty-six; Jason was nearing thirty-eight. If he and Jessica were ever going to have anything, the time had come to go big and go hard.
The Cheese told him the Mexicans might front him dope—serious weight: ounces, not grams. Jason could bring it down to Lancaster, divvy it up among a few trusted junkie sellers, collect the proceeds, make another trip to Columbus, pay back the Mexicans, keep the profit, and load up again. Jason wanted to go into the wholesale pharmaceutical business.
Though he knew where he wanted to end up, he was vague on how to get there. Jason was not a management guy; he was an eighth-grade dropout who had never been able to manage himself. But then Lloyd Romine hit him up on Facebook.
Lloyd barely knew Jason. They’d met in the county jail annex out by the Southeastern Correctional Institution, on BIS Road, a couple of years before and hadn’t spoken since, but when Lloyd heard Jason was back in town, he wanted to say hello. No particular reason. When Jason saw Lloyd’s message, he said to himself, “‘He has a reputation in this town for beating people up and shit,’ and I was like, ‘Well, shit, I’m gonna put him on my team.’”